


horror and ruination and other ways to strike up a conversation

by orphan_account



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Pre-Canon, complete fucking nonsense really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:40:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26143486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Arthur's face, the stubble he let grow out on purpose just to show that he could, his own brown bottle dangling loose from his fingers,Kid, we gonna be rolling you out of here in a barrel...
Relationships: Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston, John Marston/Arthur Morgan
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	horror and ruination and other ways to strike up a conversation

**Author's Note:**

> was tempted to make the title something from shakey graves' pay the road just to get people to listen to it but decided id better keep up my streak of pretentious nonsense titles instead

Ages ago, when John was old enough to have some fuzz on his balls but not old enough to stop adding a year or two when people asked his age, they ran with this girl. She was a self-proclaimed Psychic; some claptrap scammer, taking folk's money and feeding them what they wanted to hear. Dutch picked her up on her way out of town after (according to her, and said without a hint of shame to her face, just the matter-of-fact bitterness of a woman who's survived worse) the law caught on to her side business: pulling tricks in the back room of her little fortune-teller caravan. 

John _liked_ her. Not an easy thing to say. He liked her, he liked the pretty way she twitched her skirt around her ankles, how she tugged at his cheek with her slim brown fingers when she was mad. He liked it when she pulled her hair back with a bandanna and her neck glowed orange in the firelight. It's too far gone now to remember what name she was going by back then— fake, of course, just a last name she didn’t own, took him a few years to squeeze _Roberts_ out of her, and even longer to swap that out for _Marston_ — but John remembers how she looked and how it made him feel. His first taste of women like his first taste of anything else, booze or tobacco or the plate of lobster bisque that he had on a bar counter in Louisville and walked out without paying for and hadn’t stopped thinking about since. 

She liked him, too, but she liked Arthur better. She liked playing the guitar Hosea had picked up from a wagon crash in Tucson (and that none of them ever had the patience to learn to play proper themselves), quick tempo, her wild-woman voice, words in his language that he couldn't really understand, only feel. She swore up and down she really was Psychic, that she could talk to ghosts; that if she planted her elbows on the spool table across from John and counted the number of sun-freckles that went across his nose, it told her he'd marry the girl of his dreams and have seven kids and build a house out in the mountains. She picked dried yellow brittlebush flowers up from the dirt and tied them into little bouquets with her hair ribbon. Her favorite skirts had roses printed into the fabric. She told Hosea to stop wearing his watch chain because it was bad luck; the next week a low branch caught the chain, whipped the watch right out of his pocket, and shattered it against the trunk of a tree. Afterwards, Hosea found a palmful of brass cogs in his boot and spent half a day picking glass out of the leather of his saddle, and John blindly believed anything she said for a damn long time.

But he never meant to tell her that he loved her. She just knew; shook her head and laughed when he confessed to her all kid-drunk on a thimble of whiskey and heartache, kissed him on the mouth only once and called him a sweet little boy even if it wasn't true. She liked Arthur better, and she showed it— but he'd been gone for that Linton woman for weeks before she even joined up. It made him sick to see Arthur sit with his head in the clouds (daydreaming about catching Mary in his arms after she stumbled over a cobblestone, or the little gold barrettes she wore above her ear) while that wild girl, _John’s_ Girl, read his future off his palms and held his broad hands in her lap as she did it. 

"And here," tracing with one warm pale fingernail over the center of his palm, "is his lifeline. Seems to get cut short, poor thing."

"Is that so," he'd say. That's all. 

John would get mad, so mad he had to take his horse out to the rock face five miles from camp, riding with the spurs dug in and his hat pulled low over his eyes to keep out the dust. He'd shoot the rock and pretend the red spray of ground-up sandstone was blood; _Bang bang_ , there went his Girl who wasn't his, _Bang bang_ , Dutch on the ground with a hole through his head, _Bang bang_ , Arthur and sweet Saint Mary laid out side by side. It helped. Didn't give him something to clean up, at least— he'd started off with bottles on a fencepost and Hosea made him hunt for every shard of glass until it was pitch-fucking-black night and he had to hold a candle to the ground to see. 

He started drinking with the other men because he didn't know a quicker way to reach where they sat. They'd see him fill his dinged-up tin mug with booze and grin at him, eyes scooped out by the campfire's harsh shadows, and ask if he thought he was gonna drink all that— Arthur's face, the stubble he let grow out on purpose just to show that he could, his own brown bottle dangling loose from his fingers, _Kid, we gonna be rolling you out of here in a barrel_ — and laughed when he choked it down in one bolt and went back for more. His shoulders bumping their shoulders as he swayed between them on the logs, staring at the fire like it was a picture show. Hosea’s jokes about the Jockey and the Roadrunner. Dutch on one side, the slickness of that black silk vest against his wrist, how he guffawed and clapped his hand on the back of John’s neck and guided him upright when he started to list forward too far; John’s Girl to the left with her bare arms, her hair tied back by a bandanna, neck glowing like the sunset. She smelled like the rest of them because she got a chance to wash just as often, human sweat and horse sweat and the glassy tang of greasy hair, but he swore on his life that her skirts gave off a strange, old smell, musty but not unpleasant, like a sachet of dried sage someone left up in an attic for twenty years. 

He got all tangled in that smell when she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and pulled him to her tent (Dutch laughing again, braying, really, Arthur shaking his head looking at the dirt so John couldn't see him smile, Hosea calling out a meaningless mush of advice that he didn't understand then and doesn’t have a hope of decoding now). It puffed up in a cloud when John’s back hit her bedroll; clumsily, his thumb slipping underneath her untucked cotton shirt and sliding against the hot, sweat-slick flesh under her breast. The blur of her sighs. A sharp, quick heat and pleasure like a blast of air from a wood oven in the winter, and then nothing he could piece together later, just a disembodied rolling fall of touch and pressure and the scrape of rough canvas on his skin— and then the horrific, miserable morning, riding with a wet handkerchief tied above his eyes and pulling his horse to the side of the trail to vomit. That damn Girl laughing and passing John a flask and saying it was the hair of the dog that bit them and then upchucking in the same bushes as him, too. 

_Arthur_ didn't get sick. Arthur was too busy courting his Mary woman to drink, _really_ drink like he used to, much less get sick; he would wake up fresh and early and shave in his little palm-sized mirror, traipse all the fucking way to the train station in town for a so-called "mail run" even when they all knew damn good and well he'd done a "run" the day before and come back emptyhanded. No one on God's green earth is falling out of their chair to write Mr. Hepidiah Jones anytime soon, said Dutch. Nobody can send a letter that important. 

John watched him talk to her. He looked like some big kid; twisting the brim of his hat in his hands, smiling from ear to ear, leaned up against the wooden railing for a split second before deciding that wasn't good enough and standing straight, then slouching, then pushing his hair back with his hands only to shake it back down just as quick. Watching her mouth as she talked nonsense about Family and Values and what Goddamn pattern of gingham fabric she would buy this week, or whatever it was they got on about. 

“I love the rosebud,” she’d say, “but Daddy always says only whores wear roses.” 

“Is that so,” he’d say. And then he’d take off his hat and start twisting it again. 

Arthur wanted to marry her. She wanted to marry him. They _liked_ that idea, no joke, they liked it damn well enough— John once stole his journal and flicked through everything he'd ever drawn and it was a solid line, almost, a single page's difference between the sketches he'd seen (pages filled with hawks and horses, Dutch sleeping with his hat over his eyes, the scrawny line of John’s own back as he twisted to fit his belt through all the loops) and the ones he hadn't (filled with Mary, Mary, Mary, and more Mary, as if she was the only person populating his line of sight anymore). 

And then some nights John would roll around with his Girl and not even remember it the next morning until he found her sharing his bedroll. Sometimes he'd wake up and it'd be all three of them packed into the same tent, the way it was when they were kids, just him and Arthur sharing space when he was still wiry and compact like John and it didn't feel like there was that much difference between the two of them— before Arthur got so big he outgrew all his shirts and had to walk around in Dutch's old union suit with the bottom half cut off until they found time to buy him some proper clothes, and when he came out of the general store wearing a man's duster and a man's striped collared shirt he didn't look like some raggedy street thing in handmedowns anymore, he looked like he belonged in a fucking gang of sharpshooters, like he could outgun the best of them, and he strutted around all puffed-up and pulled John to his side in the dirty pitted mirror leaning against a wall in the store's alley and grinned at him through the glass and John had never thought about how small and shifty he looked next to him until that moment. 

But sometimes they woke up sharing a tent as if they were still in the same world, as if John didn't have any catching up to do at all, and his Girl would be fast asleep with her face pressed between Arthur’s shoulderblades. 

“Gettin fucken’ tired of this.” One hand over his eyes and the other down the front of his union suit, unsticking the flannel where it’d been plastered to his body. “Gettin real fucken’ tired, Johnny.” 

“Is that so,” he'd say.

But Arthur met Mary and decided to try and be a man. He didn’t get sick anymore, didn't drink like he used to, but there was a time when he poured hooch down his throat like water and dared Hosea to shoot the buds off of cactus flowers and put holes in the tents when he keeled over with the gun in his hand, really, honest-on-your-mother’s-eyes he would pass out right there and send a wild shot zinging two yards over his head and scare the Christ-blessed shit out of John and Dutch would have to wrestle him into his bedroll to keep him from shooting himself in the foot. And the next morning he was as pale and sick as everybody else, he'd be passing John a canteen and suffering in the sun because there was no Girl back then, there was no Mary, and Arthur was the one who crawled over to John’s side of the tent on his hands and knees with his head hanging down and swaying like he had such a joke to laugh at that he couldn't even look at him straight. John would lay flat and not breathe and Arthur’s dull round fingernails would scrape painless white lines onto his stomach while he unbuttoned his shirt, and he’d open his mouth if Arthur pressed his thumb on it but otherwise, he kept it shut and Hosea and Dutch didn't say a word, didn't know a thing because it was just them two in-the-know, and everything seemed fine and fucking dandy for a long while until God up and decided to say Here you go, here’s Mary, and a Girl who wraps her hand around your wrist and tugs you away from the fire while the others kick at your shins with the toe of their boots and holler about the Ring-Dang-Do. So Arthur better keep his mouth shut, now, said God. You boys understand. You be good. 

Used to, they’d trot into some fresh hunting ground with names like Samuel and Jacob or Callahan and Zephrees, and Arthur told shopkeepers and gunsmiths and barmen that John was his Brother, yes Sir, ain't got nobody after Ma and Pa passed few years back, Scarlet Fever, Sir, yes, and we been sleeping rough for a few days would you mind pointing a feller towards the nearest bed? Here? On the house, sir? Why you're too kind. Too kind. 

After all that they’d get warm dry rooms with warm dry beds and collapse onto the same sheets and fall dead asleep with their clothes on as brothers do. John always dreamt about broken windows and boots coming through the ceiling; when he woke up he’d have sweat on the back of his neck, wetting down his hair, and Arthur would be sleeping like a log, so the first thing he did when he woke up was punch him in the stomach for it. For letting them sleep like brothers. And Arthur either beat the tar out of him or clutched his stomach and rolled around on the bed laughing depending on how nice he felt like being. Sometimes John kissed him on the mouth and then punched him right after, when his eyes were open white blank rounds of shock, before he was done gasping, and Arthur always beat the tar out of him when he did it that way (or, if he felt _real_ nice, he’d laugh for a spell then roll so his thick forearm was right across John’s chest, heavy, stone-solid, and do mean nasty rough-handed things that left John grinding the heels of his palm into his eyes while he came). 

But now he had none of that left in him and it made John so mad. He'd get so motherloving angry at it, at the stark turnaround, that he holed himself up as far away from the gang as he could get and thought his angry thoughts to himself, alone, wandering the plains or sitting ass-deep in a stream with his clothes on like a stupid child, thinking how if anyone came struttin’ down that trail, he would shoot them. He'd think Hell, I'm so angry, if a Pastor walked into this clearing right now I'd put one between his eyes. If someone came screaming for help I'd shoot them dead before I got up. Hell. 

And no one ever came across him and he never even loaded his gun but really, he really thinks he could have shot someone. Maybe. He might have. Maybe he should have loaded all his guns and piled them on his skinny shoulders that wouldn't get any wider no matter how hard he tried and marched himself into the nearest town and just started shooting. Like those half-tall tales about The James Gang, how they shot up a whole saloon over a poker game and left no survivors, even the bottles broken up and bleeding their guts down the sideboard. Those black-hat bad guys in Hosea's fireside gunslinger stories. Hell. If they could do it why not John. Why not him. Hell. There were places in the world you could go where you bought a ticket and got yourself a seat to watch dogs fight with bulls, he'd heard. There were places in the world where men went up onstage and slipped swords down their throats and managed not to cut their insides to ribbons. There were cities with the roads full of motorcars and the rivers so choked with steamboats that you could run from one bank to another without getting your feet wet, and the air looked dim and blue with smoke at all hours of the day. So why not John. Sure.

And John thinks he wanted to kill the girl; he had daydreams about taking fistfuls of her thick shiny hair and throwing her to the ground, and the picture in his mind couldn't fit the rails of it together the same as in real life so she would shatter like porcelain when she hit the dirt as if he'd dreamed her into a piece of crockery. Sometimes instead of her hair he was taking fistfuls of a man's blue striped shirt just like Arthur's but in those dreams whoever John was throwing down shattered before he saw his face so he could not be sure if it was him or just another clay-person, handmade and breakable. Hosea's watch exploding against the trunk of the tree. Cactus flowers popped by a bullet into nothing but flecks of pollen, pink scraps. 

And if dogs can rip out the throats of bulls and ladies dance naked on the stages of Paris then fuck, why can’t there be a place to believe your own lies? Why couldn't they really have been Jeremiah and Alexander, orphaned brothers looking for a warm place to sleep? Why couldn't Dutch and Hosea be upstanding businesslike gentlemen slick with oil-wealth? The Girl was made of white fired ceramic, Arthur's shirt wouldn't rip where he grabbed it, and he could have walked into any store he wanted and filled his pockets with apples and tins of coffee and pennycandy and walked out the front door, and the shopkeep wouldn't have batted an eye. Bears the size of covered wagons lived in the Rockies and mosquitoes the size of birds in Mississippi; there was an ole Indian chief somewhere out on the plains who smoked out of long pipes and knew how to make a potion of herbs and river-water that made you live forever. The Girl could look him in the eye and tell him his future. 

So now here it is.


End file.
